Candidates Aim for Middle Class

Obama, Distracted by Wright, Still Ahead in North Carolina

Sen. Barack Obama followed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to the podium Sunday night at a Democratic dinner in Indianapolis, but even before she spoke, he knew firsthand what she told the crowd. “I am no shrinking violet,” Clinton said, her voice hoarse from long hours campaigning. “I may stumble. I may get knocked down. But I will always get right back up.”

Just a few weeks ago, Obama had reason to hope that, with his lead in the delegate count and victories in Tuesday’s Democratic primaries in Indiana and North Carolina he could wrap up the Democratic presidential nomination this week.

But while polls show Obama ahead in North Carolina, Clinton leads Indiana -- and has shown no inclination to give up the fight. Instead, the two weeks since her victory in Pennsylvania seem to have revived her.

Clinton’s fund-raising has been strong and she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have been on a relentless campaign schedule. Clinton has continued to argue to superdelegates, the party leaders likely to decide the Democratic nomination, that she is best suited to take on Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the presumptive Republican nominee, in the general election in November.

Perhaps most important, while Obama has been distracted by fresh questions about Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his controversial former pastor, Clinton has been on the offensive, hoping to expand her edge among working-class voters with a sharp focus on a proposal to suspend the federal gas tax for the summer.

Democratic leaders in Congress have shown little interest in the tax suspension, making it unlikely to become law. Economists, both left and right, have come out strongly against it. But Clinton has seized the issue, convinced that it will set her apart from Obama, who is already weak among white, working-class voters. A national poll out last week from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press showed Clinton's lead over Obama among whites who didn't go to college had increased from 10 points in March to 40 points at the end of April.

In her Sunday speech, Clinton seemed to invoke a middle-class image at every turn. There were “bread-and-butter, kitchen-table issues” and memories of her own childhood, outside Chicago, “in a middle-class family.” Clinton mentioned “teachers [who] are grading papers and nurses [who] are caring for the sick. They need a president who listens to them. Waitresses are pouring coffee and police officers are standing guard,” Clinton said, and small business owners, too. “People are ready to have a president again who does listen to them, who talks to them,” Clinton said. “You need someone today who stands strong for you.”

The gas-tax holiday, which McCain has also backed, has drawn criticism from many policy experts. But pressed Sunday on ABC, Clinton stood by the plan. “I think we’ve been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion basically behind policies that haven’t worked well for the middle class and hard-working Americans,” she said.

In her Sunday speech, Clinton seemed to invoke a middle-class image at every turn.

“I’m not going to put in my lot with economists,” she said. Clinton did not name Obama, but appeared to reprise her recent criticisms of him as elitist and out of touch, a line that emerged after his comments at a San Francisco fund-raiser that small-town Americans who face tough economic times become “bitter” and “cling” to guns and religion in response. “Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans,” Clinton said.

Campaigning in North Carolina and Indiana, Obama has recently shifted his approach, trading rallies in front of thousands for smaller more intimate gatherings. "We were on a steady diet of large rallies," said David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, told The Politico. "And that can become a fatty diet."

Over the weekend, Obama's daughters, Sasha, 6, and Malia, 9, who have largely been absent from the campaign trail, traveled with him – and went roller skating. While Obama’s biography – the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya – has been central to his candidacy, he has recently started talking about it more.

"When you are running for president, you make certain assumptions that people after 15 months know who you are," Obama told reporters recently. "Then you realize that maybe there are a whole bunch of folks who don't know who you are despite the fact that you're on TV every day."

“This is the country that made it possible for my mother – a single parent who had to go on food stamps at one point – to send my sister and me to the best schools in the world with the help of scholarships,” Obama said Sunday night, trying to boost his own working-class credibility. “This is the country that allowed my father-in-law – a city worker at a South Side water filtration plant – to provide for his wife and two children on a single salary.”

But Obama has stood firm in his opposition to the gas tax plan, calling it political gimmickry that would do nothing to solve the country’s energy woes. A television ad running in Indiana and North Carolina calls it “a bogus gas tax gimmick.”

“A gas-tax holiday?” Obama said Sunday night. “Does anybody here really trust the oil companies to give you the savings instead of pocketing the money themselves? It’s a shell game.” There are signs that voters agree. A New York Times poll released Monday found that a majority of voters called suspension of the gas tax a political tactic.

But last week, Geoff Garin, Clinton’s top strategist, said the campaign’s own polling showed that voters liked the idea, and the Clinton campaign has indicated it plans to stick with the proposal through the remaining primaries. Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director, told reporters on a conference call Sunday that the campaign would continue to talk about the gas tax in West Virginia, which holds is primary May 13, as well as in Kentucky, Oregon, Montana and South Dakota.

“That’s a critical distinction in this race between, in Sen. Clinton, someone who understands the pain that middle-class and working-class families are feeling, who wants to help bring immediate relief to them and wants to do it in a fiscally responsible way to ensure that the oil companies make up the revenue; and Sen. Obama, somebody who just doesn’t seem to understand that middle-class families are hurting, working-class families are hurting and that they need relief.”

Wolfson signaled that the Clinton campaign would also begin to cast the difference between the Democratic candidates on the gas tax in a wider context, linking it to health care and home foreclosures, where, the Clinton campaign argues, its policies would have a broader effect than those offered by Obama. “It’s an important policy difference that says something larger about the two candidates and that larger frame is consistent with some of the policy differences we’ve seen throughout this campaign,” Wolfson said.

Wolfson said those differences help explain Clinton’s strength among working-class and middle-class voters, her victories in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania -- and, they hope, on Tuesday. “They know that Sen. Clinton is on their side," Wolfson said. "They know that Sen. Clinton is a champion and fighter for them and they are voting accordingly.”

As Clinton put it Sunday night, “I will never quit until the job is finished.”

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